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Italian Sound Pack

i know you're very busy, i sent you four emails starting from January + one PM here one week ago, to know what are the plans in translations support, i try with a public post now.

From the italian sound pack first release, many people asked for the Android version in our forum, Facebook Page and Youtube channel and we always said that everything depended on your decisions.

Please, i would like to have any kind of answer so I can decide whether to continue or not the italian soundpack development, to make it compatible with CrewChief updates and Project CARS 2, Assetto Corsa, rFactor 2, RaceRoom.

Projec CARS 2 is coming and it's already late to set up all the work I should do.

Sorry for this post, but I did not really know what else to do to get some answers.

P.S. for italian people who don't know the italian soundpack, search "ingegnere in italiano by projectcars.it", it was tested only with Project CARS, but i know that, even if not tested and completed, they use it in Assetto Corsa, rFactor 2 and RaceRoom too.

I can only apologise for not responding to your (entirely reasonable) questions. I have indeed been busy, but it's no excuse for rudeness.

As you'll have seen, there have been lots of changes in CC recently. The PC app has been extended a lot, with lots of new sounds including corner names, alternate spotter voices, yellow flag messages, personalisations, new number / time recordings, and many other things. I've not seen the PCars 2 data so don't know what's in it, but I expect more recordings and (lots) more development work will be needed.

The Android app has been updated to use Google's APK Expansion libraries (if you can all them that - they're hopelessly broken and needed to be rewritten). This lifts the 100Mb restriction on the app's size - the APK expansion allows the app to be however large it needs to be, which solves one of the main problems I was having with it. However, I don't think this would help you recoup some of your hard work and investment in the Italian sound pack - the app is a single paid app on the Play Store, as it was before.

Adding in-app purchases is a chunk of work I've not done and the truth is I simple don't have the time to do this. It changes so much about the app that I'd have to repackage it and sell it as a separate 'thing'.

The code to support manually adding a sound pack and using this is still part of the app but it's not being actively tested by me and I don't know what state it's in.

Distributing the app with an APK expansion that's region-specific is entirely possible and not difficult, so in theory at least the app could be distributed with multiple language sound packs, allowing the user to select which one to use. But this means incorporating your work into the product which I charge for, without a sensible way of knowing who's using what sound pack (other that guessing based on how many Italian customers there are).

So what can we do here?

I'm happy to spend some time working with you on the new functionality - the new message types and number reading (which will might work a lot better in Italian). The outcome of this work would be an updated pack. But you being properly paid for this work is a challenge. I have no sensible suggestions here other than a percentage of the sales to Italian users. But this feels like a crap way to arrange this - it relies on us guessing what a sensible amount is, how much work there is, what the support issues are likely to be, and me being open and honest about it all (which I will be of course, but it's always going to be an issue).

Once again, I apologise for not responding sooner and needing this public kick up the arse